Geertz and Global Tides

As the world becomes more thoroughly interconnected, economically and politically, as people move about in unforeseen, only partially controllable, and increasingly massive, ways...(1)

Geertz was writing about identity, as can be seen from the rest of the quote, but it is relevant at the moment what with the novel coronavirus, covid-19. I am sure that Castells has something similar in one of his great, perhaps today overlooked, The Information Age trilogy books.


(1) Geertz, C. (2012). Available light: Anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The Internet, Phonebooks, and Privacy

A really interesting statement from Xfinity/Comcast:

We will no longer make available any directory listing information about our Xfinity Voice customers through ecolisting.com, directory assistance, or print publications. This includes names, phone numbers, and addresses. We also will not share any of this information with third-party publishers.
We're making this change as part of our ongoing commitment to enhance customer privacy. 

Why is this so interesting? It speaks directly to the issue of unforeseen social consequences and new technology.

Early in the days of pushing the information revolution, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of idea about information and change were bandied about. Two of them, relevant here, were easier access to information generally with phone numbers and addresses as an example, and the other was the end of the paper phone book (saving lots of trees, it was said, more marketing and less fact).

Starting with the paper phone book, well there are giant paper phone books from who knows what advertising-driven company delivered to my door every year. When I lived in NYC, trucks would roll around the city and low-paid workers would deposit phone books on everyone's stoops. I've received them here in Massachusetts as well in the last year. So, no, the phone book did not go away, although the companies, its specific name, and its economic model are very different from AT&T's yellow pages of the 1970s and 1980s that were completely necessary back then.

But free access to information online didn't work out either: when you try to look someone up online, unless they have put their contact information up themselves, it's often paywalled and the Google results usually look pretty dodgy. If you get an unknown phone call (my recent ones are "from" Chicago and Michigan [they almost always fake the source phone number] and feature a recorded message in Chinese with music in the background, which says something about the economics of the phone-spam industry reaching out to non-English speakers in the US) and you Google the number to do a reverse lookup (a simple database operation), it is often very hard to get any information at all, although this could be because the number that shows up on your caller ID isn't actually in service. The point is, you can't actually look people up easily unless they are fairly digitally oriented.

So, we still have paper phone books, but they are not exactly the paper phone books from 40 years ago, and we still can't look people or phone numbers up online (I am tempted to mention the "where's my flying car?" trope, but we have flying cars, it's just that we call them helicopters and they are incredibly more complex than today's regular cars), and, to come back to Xfinity, maybe we don't even want this information available--when it was merely in a paper phonebook, restricted to who had access to those phonebooks, that was one thing, but in today's digital world where Macedonian teenagers can make websites devoted to fake news stories (which are shared to Facebook or via Twitter and then can make their way up the news hierarchy to actual televised news shows), maybe having easy access to everything is not the best idea. (I'll avoid a tangent to how newspapers, despite being driven by advertising revenue, still mostly cared about the advertisements they ran in their pages, but Facebook and Twitter don't see it that way.)

UK Tabloids and Royalty

Really interesting and depressing comparison of headlines of the Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle (as an American, we have no royal titles, so I'll just label them princesses as in "married to princes" but they have titles and such) and the racism and perhaps classism of the British tabloid press (perhaps it's even intersectional). The point is to show this happens at all, and hey, here it is. Shameful. But what is to be done about it?

"Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That Might Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cutting Off Royal Reporters"
Subtitled, Over the years, Meghan has been shamed for the same things for which her sister-in-law, Kate, has been praised.

HICSS 53

HICSS 53 is underway, and this is the fourth year we've run the Games & Gaming minitrack in the Digital and Social Media track. Great to have all the hard work come to fruition.

Morrowind's Creation

Great read over at Polygon, "Morrowind: An oral history" by Alex Kane (and some great accompanying artwork by Ben Bauchau).

"I like to tell people that if you ever fell through the world in Morrowind, or got stuck on a piece of geometry, that was my fault." -Erik Parker
YES I HAVE DONE THAT - me. (Falling through the world is kind of cool, but you don't want it to happen too often.)

There are a lot of good quotes in there, a nice long piece that is probably best read over a few sessions.

"I’ve worked on games that I will never see again, and I spent years of my life on them. They will never be seen by another human ever again. And that sucks. They just go away, or you can’t play them because you don’t have the console anymore." -Mark Nelson

I haven't worked on any games, but this resonated with me (not because of academic papers) but because this is somewhat of a problem when it comes to video game canon, which is a longer story.

FDG 2019 SLO

FDG was a great conference! Small (I think 175 people?), great people and many great and diverse papers (from digital humanities topics to code and algorithmic efficiency).

One of the keynote speakers was Tarn Adams, of Dwarf Fortress fame, a game I have described as "I can never play it again because it would ruin my life", meaning, it's so great I would just get sucked into all of its amazingness and details. Actually, maybe I could just oh okay there you see? But maybe! Just be good about limits (it's difficult to limit with DF). But anyways, Adams gave a great and interesting and insightful talk about procedurally generated content and storytelling within the setting of DF.

Is that Tarn Adams back there in the blue shirt? It is! Selfie time!

One of the attendees also made this cool and beautiful card game with everyone's papers as a part of the game! I managed to find one of mine and may have kept it to put on my refrigerator.

Pedantic and Accurate Tyepsetting

For years I have wondered how to italicize and capitalize newspaper titles such as, and I will do it correctly here, the New York Times. I always wondered, should the initial "the" be capitalized, because it seems like part of the title? (No.) How much should be italicized, since isn't all of it the title, or not? (Not the location.)

I figured the exceedingly pedantic (but in the good way) New Yorker would, one day, give me guidance on that. They have! I thank them.